Conversational Cooking: Raclette Cooking!

I love interactive dining - Korean BBQ, fondue, hot pot - there's something about social dining where you cook your own food. One style of DIY dining I've always wanted to try, though, is raclette; Raclette is actually a dish that originates in Switzerland and means "to scrape", from the French verb racler. Raclette is a cheese that is heated and then scraped and traditionally paired with breads, potatoes and pickles.

Nowadays, raclette means a lot more than that. Raclette is an entire dining experience where you cook your food on your tabletop. There are both smaller-style raclettes and large scale electric raclettes available at most home stores.

Imagine my astonishment and pleasure when I was asked to review Anne Lawrence's book Conversational Cooking, based on raclette dining!

Anne does a good job of explaining raclette and why she chooses to dine this way with her children. The book comes with two small raclettes that are candle powered. 4 tealights per raclette will cook your food.

The cookbook itself is easy to use and understand with practical tips and recipes. Of course, as Anne mentions in the book, there are no rules when it comes to raclette dining and the fun is in the experiment!

Anne has four children (one is an Isabelle!) and I can only imagine how much fun it would be to dine raclette-style as a family. My husband and I had a blast.

For our raclette meal, we opted for veal cutlet (seasoned and thinly-sliced) as our meat and a variety of vegetables. I chopped up scallions, zucchini and mushrooms and cubed both gruyere cheese and traditional raclette.

Once everything was chopped, it was time to get cooking! We lit the tealights and let the raclettes get warm with a bit of olive oil.

It only takes a few minutes to cook our meat and veg. We chose veal as it's an easy and fast meat to cook. If you're cooking chicken, please ensure it's cooked thoroughly.

We loved experimenting with the different flavours. We even tried BBQ sauce on the raclette for added flavour.

The raclette surface is actually a non-stick one, and is dishwasher safe. It also comes with a plastic scraper so you don't scratch the surface. I personally opted to use my silicone tongs, as I felt I had a bit more control in the flipping of the ingredients.

After we finished our savoury dishes, it was time to give the surface of the raclette a quick cleaning and move onto dessert.

How amazing is this? Fresh Ontario strawberries and melted nutella on the raclette! We did have to blow out a few of the tealights as the raclette got a bit too hot, but once we had that under control, it was smooth sailing.

And there you have it! A full raclette meal. We will totally do this again and even use for upcoming parties with our friends. We may need a few extra raclettes to go around, but we'll be good to go!

Bon appetit!

Disclosure: I'm a PTPA Blogaholic and receive items for review. The opinions expressed on my blog are my own.